Families seek truth on Lockerbie

SCOTLAND: Fifteen years to the day since Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, families of the British victims yesterday…

SCOTLAND: Fifteen years to the day since Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, families of the British victims yesterday demanded an independent inquiry into the bombing, insisting many questions remained unanswered.

The families welcomed Libya's surprise announcement on Friday that it was abandoning its banned chemical and nuclear weapons programmes.

Libya earlier this year accepted responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and agreed to pay billions of dollars to relatives of the 270 victims. A Libyan secret agent, Abdel-Basset al-Megrahi, was jailed for life in January 2001.

But UK Families Flight 103, a group which campaigns for those killed in the worst disaster in British aviation history, said despite al-Megrahi's conviction there was still much that was not known about the bombing that killed 259 on board the Boeing 747 and 11 people in the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

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"We cannot rest until we know the full truth of what happened at Lockerbie," the group said in a statement. "We live without them every day, we owe it to them to find out what happened.

"After all this time, our questions are the same: Why did it happen? What was the motivation behind it? Who was responsible for planning it? Who paid for it? How was it allowed to happen?" the group said.

"The trial and the subsequent appeal provided only the facts needed for a conviction and many important issues were deemed irrelevant." Pan Am Flight 103 had arrived at London's Heathrow from Frankfurt and was flying over Scotland on its way to New York on December 21st, 1988.

 - (Reuters)